I am installing EMBOSS on my UBUNTU system. I follow ./configure, make and make install. At make install step, there is an error appearing as follows: error while loading shared libraries: libnucleus.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I am asking Biostar members how to resolve this problem. THANKS very much!!

I had this same problem today, and the available responses to the question did not help. I finally figured it out after some struggle. I though I should share the solution, in case someone else stumbles across this page. The EMBOSS installer does not refresh the library load cache, and therefore the installed libraries are not visible. The fix is to execute the following command as root after make install:

ldconfig

At this point one can run make install one more time just to make sure everything is OK.

Installing a package managed library and then installing a built from source version is not a good idea. As well as version mismatch issues this can cause problems with package dependencies. It is best to either use the packages or build from source, when installing to system locations (e.g. /usr/ or /usr/local/).

That said if you need to have both the package managed version (say to handle package dependencies, or provide specific features) and a source build (to provide a specific version, to test a new version, to have the latest version or to support development), you can do this as long as you install the source based build to a local installation location using the '--prefix=location' option to configure. For example I typically install source based EMBOSS builds into '$HOME/usr/EMBOSS-version', so I can have multiple versions available (handy when working out if a specific behaviour is a bug), while still using the Debian med EMBOSS packages by default.

Yes, I retract the second part of that answer - mix and match not a good idea.

I think you just need to clean up and start again as Hamish suggests. I have never had a problem with EMBOSS install on any Ubuntu machine. It sounds like you are dealing with "your own local mess", which is always difficult for others to troubleshoot :)

i run sudo apt-get install emboss-lib, and then make install, finally make installcheck. There are two minor errors: runJemboss.sh does not support *[installchekc-binSCRIPTS] error1 Leaving directory 'xxx/jemboss' * [installcheck-recursive] error1 leaving directory 'xxx/jemboss' . So it seems i cannot run jemboss package, do you think it a minor error? THANKS!!

That error suggests that 'libnucleus' failed to build correctly. This implies that you are either missing a build dependency (and 'configure' has not omitted it correctly), or your configuration flags are not appropriate.